eaning is not in the head. That summarizes much of the thrust of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein's influential philosophy of linguistic meaning. How did he get to that rather odd conclusion in the face of over two millennia of opinion to the contrary?
After medieval Christian philosophy finally wrestled loose the Hellenistic grip on knowledge, non-Christian philosophy had little place to go for centuries except to lunge into the egocentric predicament, that inescapable prison of mind. By the early twentieth century, philosophy had become sick of this subjectivism of ideas and attempted an advance into objectivism. Enter Wittgenstein and friends.
The early Wittgenstein had pictured the world as a collection of discrete individuals that clicked together neatly like a plastic puzzle. But the later Wittgenstein had become more relativistic, having traded his vision of a puzzle world for a shapeless, jello world molded differently by different cultures. His many arguments for these conclusions are subtle, creative, and often ingenious. He will be remembered beyond his century, though hopefully as a foil, not as model for Christian philosophy.
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations opens by criticizing Augustine's theory of linguistic meaning as being too simplistic, being, it appeared, too much like Wittgenstein's own earlier view. (Augustine actually has a far more sophisticated theory than Wittgenstein ever interacts with.) He sees this "primitive" view as holding that "Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands" (PI, 1). But, he claims, our philosophical confusions stem largely from believing this meaning to be some mental object separate from the word ("Here the word, there the meaning" PI, 120). Instead, he urges us "not to think of understanding as a `mental process' at all. . . . Understanding is not a mental process" (PI, 154.).
To get to this surprising conclusion, he aims to show that images and internal experiences are neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding the meaning of a word. For example, images aren't necessary since a great many images may accompany the understanding of a word on different occasions for different people. And some words have no associated images at all ("the"). On the other side, images, he says, are not sufficient since an image itself cannot tell us the correct use of a word; it is uninterpreted or "semantically inert" all by itself. For all their intrigue, these sorts of arguments betray a modern naivete at many points. For example, most of his arguments assume that everything mental is an image, which is quite false. Wittgenstein may score points against a more simplistic theory of meaning, such as that of John Locke, but his entire discussion lacks the subtlety of medieval insights.
Wittgenstein's more famous constructive contributions are his arguments for the view that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (PI, 43). In place of meaning as the referent or as a mental something, Wittgenstein argues that our actual practice shows that meaning is most closely associated with use, with custom—"to be a master of a technique" (PI, 199). The meaning of "cream pie" is not the sticky object in the world or the less sticky image in one's head, but the set of customs agreed upon by a language culture.
Wittgenstein has certainly made some helpful observations about use and custom, but as it stands this connection to use is quite incomplete. It creates more problems that it solves. For example, getting us out of our heads into the world of public verification was supposed to free us from the problems that occurred in relation to mind. Above we saw Wittgenstein complain that mental images aren't sufficient because they need further interpretation, but the same objection can be levelled against meaning as use. Like an image, no use or custom in and of itself carries its own meaning. Customs may even need more interpretation than images. If the reply is that customs can be verified via public language games, then a reply is that (pace one take of his Private Language Argument) the same can verify ideas and concepts, in ways we do quite commonly every day.
Further problems lurk with use. Imagine if someone just learning English asked, "What is the meaning of `cream pie'?" And we replied, "Well, it's the mastery of the following social conventions" and gave him a short performance. It would seem that we hadn't really answered his question. "Cream pie" doesn't mean a set of rules. It's as if the questioner asked for the meaning of "stop" and we just hand him a red octagon.
Wittgenstein seems to be answering a different question entirely, confusing meaning with an indicator of meaning. He is involved with a basic category mistake. And it's the sort of mistake that makes him start attributing mental features to language symbols themselves. He (and many in the twentieth century) speak as if words—mere physical symbols—can do all sorts of magical things all by themselves like pointing, referring, meaning, even creating entire worlds. But inert symbols can't do any of that. Though minds can. Minds can refer and mean all day long.
Wittgenstein was right in fighting the egocentric predicament, but he
only plunged us in further. The history of philosophy shifted from Greek Forms
to minds to language as the grounds of objectivity. But none of these will do.
As the later medievals recognized, divine providence and a very strong doctrine
of creation provide the best ground for a theory of linguistic meaning. The
world isn't jello. God has cut it into kinds and conserves it independently of
our minds and languages. And He has given us lively minds that can know and
talk about Him and His creation.
